Abstract
Abstract. Over recent decades, the global population has been rapidly increasing and human activities have altered terrestrial water fluxes to an unprecedented extent. The phenomenal growth of the human footprint has significantly modified hydrological processes in various ways (e.g. irrigation, artificial dams, and water diversion) and at various scales (from a watershed to the globe). During the early 1990s, awareness of the potential for increased water scarcity led to the first detailed global water resource assessments. Shortly thereafter, in order to analyse the human perturbation on terrestrial water resources, the first generation of large-scale hydrological models (LHMs) was produced. However, at this early stage few models considered the interaction between terrestrial water fluxes and human activities, including water use and reservoir regulation, and even fewer models distinguished water use from surface water and groundwater resources. Since the early 2000s, a growing number of LHMs have incorporated human impacts on the hydrological cycle, yet the representation of human activities in hydrological models remains challenging. In this paper we provide a synthesis of progress in the development and application of human impact modelling in LHMs. We highlight a number of key challenges and discuss possible improvements in order to better represent the human–water interface in hydrological models.
Highlights
The Earth’s surface has undergone drastic changes due to the human-driven alteration of land use and vegetation patterns and the management of surface water and groundwater systems (Bondeau et al, 2007; Gerten et al, 2007; Rost et al, 2008)
In this paper we provide a synthesis of progress in the development and application of human impact modelling in largescale hydrological models (LHMs)
This paper builds upon contributions from previous modelling efforts aimed at incorporating human activities in hydrology and in large-scale water resource assessments, and has tried to highlight the need for further improvements, including a number of key unsolved questions
Summary
The Earth’s surface has undergone drastic changes due to the human-driven alteration of land use and vegetation patterns and the management of surface water and groundwater systems (Bondeau et al, 2007; Gerten et al, 2007; Rost et al, 2008). Agriculture and urbanization affect the delivery and quality of water to river and groundwater systems (Siebert et al, 2010); many river flows are regulated (Lehner et al, 2011) and threaten ecological flows (Poff et al, 2010); water use, in particular for irrigation, can be a dominant factor in the hydrological cycle, including effects on land–atmosphere feedbacks and precipitation (Wada et al, 2016a) that can have substantial non-local impacts (Dirmeyer et al, 2009; Tuinenburg et al, 2012; Wei et al, 2013; Lo and Famiglietti, 2013). These models solve the local water balance consistently across large scales and calculate river discharge by accumulating gridded runoff over a river network constructed from topographic information (Vörösmarty et al, 1989) At this early stage few models considered the interaction between terrestrial water fluxes and human activities, including water use and reservoir regulation, and even fewer models distinguished water use from surface water and groundwater resources (Nazemi and Wheater, 2015a, b). The primary objective of this contribution is to discuss the integration of human activities into process-based hydrological modelling and to provide future directions
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